


Coward

by Fionavar



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Aftermath, Gen, Negative Self Talk, Panic Attack, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-13 00:23:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18457673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fionavar/pseuds/Fionavar
Summary: The AE party went to a bath house in Silverymoon at the invitation of Harper's 'friend', Vigo. Khem lasted about as long as it took Katy to start taking off her clothes, then left.This is what the party didn't see.





	Coward

**Author's Note:**

  * For [codenamecynic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/codenamecynic/gifts), [bettydice (BettyKnight)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BettyKnight/gifts), [Dakoyone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dakoyone/gifts), [onemooncircles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/onemooncircles/gifts), [vhaerauning](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vhaerauning/gifts).



_Coward_.

Her sleeves cover her hands, nails curled deep into her palms, a small concession to truth allowing her to hold the brittle façade. “Have a pleasant evening,” she wishes Harper – Harper, who always sees too much, who wants her to trust him, who looks now as though he’d expected better from her.

Harper, who, like Shay and Katy, matters too much.

She stiffens her spine as she turns, nails digging deeper to still the shaking in her hands, freezes the polite neutrality onto her face as she makes her way out of the bath house. The same woman who guided them in is still at the door, and she coos at Khem as she passes.

“Were you looking for something else, dearie?”

“Just the exit,” Khem says, the words bitten off sharp as urgency shades towards desperation in the hammering of her pulse, the pressure in her throat and the back of her skull.

Harmony appears to take no notice of the discourtesy. “You do look a bit peaky. Are you sure we can’t offer you –“

“Entirely. Just take care of my-“ _friends_ is Katy’s word, and Harper’s definition doesn’t seem inaccurate, but it’s not something Khem can say now, if ever, and instead she shakes her head.

“Of course, lovey. Right you are,” and finally, mercifully, Harmony stops talking and directs Khem out into the night.

The air is not exactly fresh in Silverymoon, cloying with the perfumes of a thousand different flowers, but it is cooler, and it is quieter, and the streets are safer than Skullport’s.  Khem gulps down great irregular lungfuls of air, but it might as well be hiexel smoke for all the good it does her.

_Coward._

She steps toward the shadow of the building, a swift movement that is more akin to a rabbit bolting for cover than a Red Wizard choosing her ground. She feels it in her feet, the stumbling uncertainty that advertises her weakness and invites the observant predator to take the easy kill. But this is not home, and nobody is watching her.

Nobody she can see.

She is in no condition to observe.

Khem lifts her arms, letting the sleeves fall away from her shaking hands. In the dim light, the curved marks of her nails are clear and dark, and one of them is bleeding. That’s fine, that’s not unusual. That she can work with, but she has to steady them. There are exercises she knows – she has practised casting under all kinds of adverse conditions – upside down, in melee combat, on fire, in a storm of ice, and – no. Khem chokes off the thought and the memories before they can add fuel to the fire, but her stomach roils with nausea in their wake.

She doesn’t think she has the composure for anything more elegant or thorough, and she wants to cast immediately, twist herself into a shape that has no room for the intensity of this fear, this loathing, this failure, this… overwhelming, bitter, _ugly_ truth. If she can change forms, she can leave some of it behind, have a little time to make room and muster her reserves to deal with it when it catches up to her again. So quick and hard, before her reflexes can stop her, Khem slams her hands against the brick. Pain shoots through them, sharp and familiar enough to steady them if only for a few moments; she rushes her _polymorph_ spell _,_ the syllables of the incantation squeezed out through a tight throat and off-rhythm, the gestures sloppy and imprecise. It is enough, and relief coils around her as her body reshapes itself and she rises on grey wings –

_Coward._

_Weak._

_Worthless._

\- and she falls, unable to hold the spell. Her knees crunch on the cobblestones; her palms burn like – like the time she ignited them under Mistress Aneth-ke’s instruction, although it is fading, she didn’t fall from very high, and Khem pushes herself up. Her face, too, is burning, she can feel the heat of her shame. A new twist of the wire constricting around her mind – if she cannot even hold a spell –

She can hold, Khem tells herself as she starts to walk. She has survived worse, there is no reason she should be falling apart now. The street is dark and mostly empty, but she starts at every sound and eventually gives up trying to hide it. What control she can muster, instant by instant, she uses to bolster the eroding bulwark in her mind. Once she has a locked door at her back, a pen in her hand and a blank sheet in front of her the tide may come in. Until then –

Khem steps into an alleyway as two elves walk down the street toward her. They haven’t seen her, she thinks, too caught up in a conversation she cannot understand and a laughing, physical tension she recognises all too easily. Absurd. They are nothing to her, they probably wouldn’t even see someone else pass by, but here she is, a Red Wizard of Thay with her back pressed against bricks, dry-mouthed and chest heaving as her body fights to sustain the hard, shuddering heartbeat, hiding in an alley with a pile of goat droppings beside her foot, lest strangers’ eyes fall on her now.

 _What_ is she? Khem thinks, not for the first time in the last handful of weeks, and the answer rises in her mind in a red rush of hatred, smoothly as a counterweight: _coward._

 It takes a very long time to return to the inn. The main room is crowded with patrons enjoying their alcohol and each others’ company, and the sheer noise of them hits Khem like physical force; she rocks back on her heels.

“Here, you look like you’ve had a bit too much already,” a man says, and Khem flinches away from the rough concern in his voice as from a whip-cut on raw flesh.

“It’s nothing,” she says, and “I’m fine,” neither of which sound very convincing to her – she is a poor liar, especially with little attention to spare for the effort – but it must be close enough, since he doesn’t press the matter.

Finally the room door is closed and locked, and Khem’s legs give way beneath her in sheer relief. The floor is solid, the door is solid, it’s not safety but it’s close enough. She curls over, presses her face into her hands. They sting at the pressure but she ignores it, pain is familiar enough to be simple.

Unlike everything else.

Khem exhales a long shaky breath, and lets her defences finally drop. They crumble like ashes as cold memory and bitter truth flood her mind.

 _Coward_.

She had been wary when Harper had mentioned the bath house. Experience has taught her that anything Katy is so vocally enthusiastic about is probably not something she would like to be involved with, and she had a vague mental image – probably the same one Katy had – of a number of people naked in a large pool of hot water. All very well for them, but nothing she was interested in.

But the question of private rooms had been raised, and that… that had attracted her. To be alone, with _water breathing_ so she could submerge herself and hear nothing but her own heartbeat, gentle water pressure on every inch of her skin and heat sinking into her bones… she’d wanted it.

So Khem had gone with the others to the bath house, let Harmony ramble on about their public bathing, their masseuses and dwarven massage golem, and then she had shown them one of the private rooms.

It had been… bigger than Khem had expected, intended more for a small group than an individual. The walls were very far away, there was an outside window, and the inside door-fastening looked none too secure. Still, perhaps she could –

And while she had been debating, Katy had rushed in, utterly confident, and engaged the room, and began stripping off her clothes almost immediately. Her fearlessness had hit Khem almost like a slap in the face – the sorceress was so _certain_ , and she was not trained as Khem had been, not as controlled in her power, yet she felt safe enough to plunge ahead, to seize what she wanted while Khem hesitated.

Khem had excused herself. She didn’t know, now, whether she’d managed to give the usual impression of offended prudery, which might further complicate matters but who cared? That would come later, if at all, and it wasn’t like that façade had ever been as effective as she’d hoped. She might as well discard it, let it all begin again – no.

Khem shuddered harder. No. She could manage that if necessary, and she’d have to eventually, but she would hold onto the tattered shreds of her dignity as if they could shelter her against the storm until they were torn from her grasp entirely.

She’d hesitated, again, outside the room. She could have asked for another one by herself, probably; there might have been one free. She’d wanted to, again, so strongly that she could almost feel it. Then images had flashed across her mind – alone and undefended, not even watching as the door opened or the window unshuttered, her affiliation clearly marked on her uncovered head, so hideously _vulnerable_ to any sort of attack, or back with the others, which would not leave her undefended but was not a prospect she could face with equamity, even after weeks of sleeping under the same shelter.

Fear ran through her, heavy in the stomach and sour in the mouth – not the fear she was used to, the old-worn calculation of odds, the one emotion she welcomed as an ally, but a sudden and mastering terror. It was not a decision that turned her toward the door; she was fleeing, not choosing.

Then Harper was there, asking her to consider staying – not with them, he knew her well enough to know she wouldn’t do that, but in a room of her own, since she was the most uptight person he’d ever met and could doubtless benefit from laying some of that burden aside for a time. It would be good for her, he said, and Khem dug her nails into her palms at every damned interfering well-meaning word, agreeing completely.

And she could not do it.

She wanted to go have a bath, and she was too afraid.

She was a Red Wizard of Thay, a member of one of the most powerful organisations in Faerûn, highly trained, intelligent and skilled, disciplined and controlled, and she could not – she could not – she could not –

Loathing welled up, twining its insidious tendrils through the fear as she listened to Harper trying to persuade her to do exactly what she wanted to do. How could she be so _weak_ , such a worthless coward? Could she not handle it if a threat presented itself? Why should she be afraid?

But she was, she was, and Khem raged at herself inwardly. She couldn’t afford to be crippled by fear, this was not what she was –

 _What_ was she?

 _Coward_.

And so, choking on fear and hatred of her fear and her inability to master it or herself, Khem had made her blind, useless way out of the bath house…

Her hands are slippery. Khem raises her face from the clenched fists, sees the blood dripping from the palms dully, without surprise. There’s blood on her face, too, she can feel it. It takes a while to force her hands to relax, to clean the blood away and find a healing potion. Old training comes easily, without thought. No wizard leaves herself with injured hands.

She will _not_ let fear rule her. Not like this. This cannot happen again.

_It will. Coward._

Alone in her room, Khem trembles.


End file.
